(Dis)similar Readings: Indian and American Audiences' Interpretation of <i>Friends</i>

Published in The International Communication Gazette, this 15-page article compares Indian and American audiences' interpretations of the Hollywood (California, USA) television situation comedy Friends, which "has a global appeal, although the reasons for its popularity might vary in different cultures." (Click here for an overview of this sitcom on Wikipedia.) The document explores the strategy of emplotment - the purposeful placement of pro-social messages such as condom use in media such as the TV show Friends - in an effort to see how and why it might work when used with different audiences.

The study is guided by S. R. Olson's narrative transparency theory, which posits transparency as "the capability of certain texts to seem familiar regardless of their origin, to seem a part of one's own culture, even though they have been crafted elsewhere." Olson's theory suggests that culturally diverse audience members interpret the same media text differently by bringing in their own values, beliefs and myths. The present comparative analysis seeks to extend Olson's theory, exploring different interpretations of the Friends media text by comparing media reception in a local (American) vs. global (Indian) context.

The fieldwork was conducted among 18- to 35-year-old self-selected regular and heavy viewers of Friends (37 Indian viewers and 35 American viewers). It included 5 focus group interviews and 17 in-depth interviews with audiences in 3 Indian cities - Chandigarh, Hyderabad and New Delhi (April 2003) - as well as 3 focus groups at a southwestern university in the United States (March 2004). The authors characterise media texts in Friends that culturally diverse audiences interpret as being similar to their reality as "transparent"; texts that are not culturally sharable in both the local and foreign culture are termed "opaque".

This analysis of Friends focused on 4 of Olson's "mythotypes": virtuality, ellipticality, inclusion and verisimilitude. The remaining 4 mythotopes - openendedness, negentropy, circularity and archetypal dramatis personae - are used to contextualise audiences' interpretations of Friends. In sum,

1. Virtuality, or forming relationships with media characters - American respondents developed a virtual relationship with more characters in Friends than the Indian audiences could.
2. Ellipticality, or creating a culturally appropriate ending - Indian and American respondents were asked their feelings about the decision of one of the characters, Monica, to call off sex for the night because she was out of condoms; both Indian and American audiences questioned whether or not it would be so easy to do so. Unlike the American audiences, who did not find it odd for friends to discuss sex so openly, Indian audiences found such frank discussion of sex as taboo and culturally inappropriate. However, the ellipticality in the narrative allowed them to engage in speculation, to fill in the gaps and to make sense of the unfolding plot.
3. Inclusion, or audience participation in the plot - Unlike their Indian counterparts, American respondents strongly felt that their own lived reality was very distant from the friendships that are portrayed in the sitcom.
4. Verisimilitude, or the truth-value of the plot - The authors found that open discussion about sex among opposite-sex siblings (Monica and Ross), and the possibility of them (knowingly) engaging in sex in adjoining rooms, is inconsistent with Indian cultural beliefs. Indian respondents also felt that the scene where Monica and Rachel are fighting over a condom was inconsistent with Indian reality. Nor did they believe that most Indian women would take the lead in procuring a condom and deciding whether or not to have sex. In contrast, while a few American respondents believed that open depiction of sexuality on Friends does not accurately represent their lived experience, overall the safe sex message was well received by the Americans, unlike the Indians.

In conclusion, the researchers found that a global media product such as Friends can become a culturally sharable and "transparent" text.. However, the comparative analysis revealed that audiences from different cultures focus on different "mythotypic" attributes of the media text, and that audiences from a foreign culture typify American culture based on media texts - making the media text "opaque" and thus not easily transferable to the Indian context. In this context, then, emplotment was more effective among the US audience than with the Indian audience.

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